A blog by Carl Kruse

Carl Kruse Dot Org Review: The SETI Institute

“Are we alone?” is a question all of us have wondered about. The SETI Institute has done more than wonder, listening now for more than 30 years for any radio signals in space for signs of alien intelligence. Radio signals propagate far and wide and any advanced society will have likely communicated with radio signals or might even be transmitting now. Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute was the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the plucky scientist who searched the airwaves for alien signals in the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact.”

Unlike what many believe, and what Hollywood loves to show us, there is no evidence today for the existence of intelligent aliens. Some would argue SETI efforts have come up empty-handed but there are reasons aplenty to believe many alien civilizations are out there given the vastness and age of space, and the laws of chemistry and physics being the same everywhere (we think). The building blocks for life as we know it are found everywhere and the probability of what happened on Earth – the evolution of intelligent life — is likely to have happened in many other places. There’s too much space out there. And so much time has passed. And we have barely done much listening or searching. Furthermore, our tools for the search — computing technologies — are still increasing at geometric rates in line with Moore’s Law, so that the number of radio frequencies researchers can analyze dramatically rises every few years. We may soon finally hear that signal from an alien intelligence, confirming that we are not alone after all.

This optimistic view has been further stoked by the discoveries of the Kepler Mission, which finds the Milky Way filled with many Earth analogues, and our galaxy, with its billions of stars, is one of 100-400 billion other galaxies in the visible universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars and an astoundingly large number of planets.

So the odds of intelligent life out there are high. Positive confirmation of it would be one of the major discoveries of human history.

Carl Kruse Dot Org invites you to join the important work of the SETI Institute (http://www.seti.org) as it tries to answer the question, “Are We Alone?”

Oh and of course please consider supporting the efforts of the SETI Institute. Contrary to popular belief they do not have that much money for their research and only relatively few scientists are engaged in full time work due to budget constraints.

I know the Parkes observatory here in Australia has been involved from time to time with SETI research but not sure what their role (if any) is now. It seems like there aren’t that many radio observatories doing SETI research given the enormity and importance of the question of possible intelligent life out there. Oh well. Still cool to see there are still those pursuing the answer.

Hello again Marty! There are less than several dozen full time SETI researchers in the world is my guess, which is astonishing. Many seem interested in the SETI quest, few seem willing to allocate the necessary resources to such a venture. It’s too bad.
Perhaps some day.